Sunday, September 7, 2008

JACK LAYTON CHOOSES WALL STREET OVER MAIN STREET

So Jack Layton ran down to the convention floor in Denver like a teenage groupie and proclaimed that “the Democrats are talking about the same kind of change we’re talking about in Canada…there is a real desire here to put the concern of the kitchen table ahead of the board room table.”

That must be news to Wall Street. Sure the Democrats talk like Robespierre, they always have. But they govern like Louis XIV. Forget the rhetoric and follow the money trail. Check out www.opensecrets.org Bluntly put, the big banks, the financial firms, the corporate law firms and the private equity companies on Wall Street pay the pipers of both parties. But Jack Layton’s friends, the Democrats, are their clear favourites, as these examples will show.

The Financial/Insurance/Real Estate Industry gave 51% of their $51 million in 2008 to the Democrats.

The Information Technology sector gave 67% of its $27 million in contributions to the Democrats in 2008.

This year the Democrats have received almost $24 million from Agribusiness, representing 41% of their influence peddling.

This is interesting. Wall Street law firms have sent 75% of their over $140 million to politician contributions to the two-faced Democrats.

Listen to this. The Defense Industry gave 52% of its $8 million in donations to Jack Layton’s allies, the Democrats, in 2008. As Canadians know, Layton has been a fierce opponent of the war in Iraq. I suppose if the Defense Industry had given its money to the Republicans it would have been referred to as the “Military Industry Complex” as it once was. The electronics sector of the Defense Industry gave 55% to the Democrats.

Wall Street promotes the candidates who serve its interests and the Democrats have delivered for them since their November 2006 victory. Democratic leaders buried a proposal to tax the massive incomes of hedge fund operators at normal rates, allowing billionaires to claim most of their income as capital gains taxed at a far lower rate. Obama also refused action on the subprime meltdown that would have threatened big financial interests.

Barack Obama took in $102.1 million for all of 2007 and by February 22, 2008 had raised $138 million, including a million form private equity firms and $9 million from corporate law firms. And hold on to your seat belt. By August 28/08 Barack Obama had raised $389,423,102 . This kind of money did not come from cab drivers, hair dressers, carpenters, supermarket clerks gardeners or the working families sitting at the kitchen table that Jack Layton’s rhetoric conjures up. It came from ordinary down-to-earth corporate goliaths like AT+T who gave $168,613 to Obama this year. And City Group who gave him $389,989 this year. And Microsoft who gave him $274,375 this year.

Now why would Microsoft give a candidate like Obama a political donation? Their donation is explicable by an Obama policy statement that maintains support for “improvements in our visa programs, including the H-1B programs, to attract some of the world’s most talented people to America.” But the most talented people in the world are already in abundant supply in America. The only problem is, Obama’s corporate benefactors don’t want to pay them the salaries they command. Better to flood the market with Asian visa workers who can be paid at 60% of that rate. Buying a pliable President and Congress for even $1billion in political contributions would be a bargain for the IT industry. Ditto for agribusiness and corporate America in general.

Upon reviewing their take, one must say that for a so-called progressive party of the down-trodden (albeit led by patricians) the Democratic Party has done pretty well for itself, as has Mr. Obama, holding out a tin cup on Wall Street and doing their panhandler act. You have to love their act. “Please Mister, can you spare me a million, I promise if I am elected, I will open up the floodgates to more cheap labour, destroy another 5 million middle class jobs, depress the wages of the jobs that remain, expand the visa programs and with the population boom cancel out any climate change strategy.” And Obama is sincere. Just three days after Hilary Clinton pulled out of the race, he declared to CNBC, “Look. I am a pro-growth, free-market guy. I love the market.”

Organized labour in America throws what little money it has toward Obama as well, 91% of it. But since 1993, it too has shared the corporate agenda of open borders, in the belief that it can broader its dues-paying membership base by signing up migrant workers. It hasn’t worked out that way. As Labour economist Vernon Briggs has demonstrated, the percentage of foreign born workers and union members in America is inversely proportional. American union workers have simply lost their jobs.

As the Democratic Socialist Senator of Vermont, Bernie Sanders put it, “If poverty is increasing and if wages are going down, I don’t know why we need millions of people to be coming into the country as guest workers who will work for lower wages than American workers and drive wages down even lower than they are now.”

Obviously, Bernie Sanders is not Jack Layton’s kind of socialist. Nor was J. S. Woodsworth, who knew that a tight labour market was a worker’s best friend and favoured restrictive immigration policies throughout his tenure as CCF leader.

So, if Democrats are talking about the same kind of change as New Democrats are, as Jack Layton maintains, then, certainly, they are all about the same kind of change.Immigrant-fed runaway population growth that will pauperize and decimate the working class, despoil environment and accelerate greenhouse gas emissions. All cloaked in green progressive rhetoric.